ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of two non-governmental expert organisations in the construction of public health discourses, agendas and policies in 1940s’ and 1950s’ Finland: Samfundet Folkhälsan (the Public Health Association of Swedish Finland) and Väestöliitto (the Finnish Population and Family Welfare League). Drawing from the literal, ‘people’s health’ meaning of the Swedish and Finnish public health concepts (folkhälsa and kansanterveys, respectively), this chapter analyses what the association meant by ‘people’, ‘health’ and ‘people’s health’. These concepts are reflected against historical conceptions and analytical interpretations of ‘race’, ‘hygiene’ and ‘racial hygiene’ of the 1920s and 1930s. The chapter concludes that the 1940s–1950s constituted a transition period when notions of race and people, hygiene and health, and racial hygiene and public health were closely intertwined in conceptions, practices and rhetoric. This was coupled with pronounced pronatalism in which motherhood was framed as a civic duty of the (‘fit’) woman. Furthermore, the construction of the ideal ‘people’ promoted bourgeois-conservative family, gender and socio-cultural models which created explicit and implicit exclusive criteria for the ‘people’. This was seen as a survival strategy against external threats to the collective: the Soviet Union vs. the Finnish nation or the Finnish-speaking majority vs. the Swedish minority.
